


Attention Whore

by canicallyoumaddie



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Gen, Indulgent angst, Insecurity, I’m so sorry, Self-Doubt, Self-Esteem Issues, This is really fucking depressing, but not sorry because I needed to write it, it hurts, pity party plaza
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-10 07:44:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12907347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canicallyoumaddie/pseuds/canicallyoumaddie
Summary: Have you ever felt like you just can’t shut up, but you know everyone’s hoping you will?That’s how Lance feels.





	Attention Whore

**Author's Note:**

> Hi this is really frikkin angsty and I’m sorry. It’s kind of self indulgent, one-shot, totally disconnected from my aus—it’s a modern au, but the self-doubt is pretty close to the same. This is kind of taking Lance’s canon subtext of thinking he doesn’t have a place on the team and running down the street and into the bowling alley with it. 
> 
> Hold onto your hearts, there won’t be a dry eye or butt in the house

Lance tapped his thumb idly against the space bar of his keyboard while he compulsively refreshed his Twitter feed. He’d just cranked out a long-ass thread about something stupid—school related, of course—and was waiting for comments, unfollows, or both.

 

It was stupid, honestly. Flipping between each social media platform, watching the feeds refresh, spewing out one new post at a time. If he was _really_ honest, he’d tell you that most of the posts he sees are his own. Lame, right?

 

All of his friends knew he loved getting attention. Preferably _good_ attention, but even bad attention meant that someone was looking. Someone remembered that he existed. Someone cared, even if it may be rife with malcontent.

 

On this particularly slow Tuesday evening, however, it was weighing heavily on his mind; the desperation that someone—anyone—would remember he was there.

 

So he sat, hands hovering over the keyboard, control-tabbing his way through all of his social media, waiting for someone to smash that motherfucking like button.

 

The most stupid part about this is that he’s aware it’s bad for him. That it’s toxic. He’s placing his worth in what other people think of him, which is just a recipe for disaster. Bad news. Because inevitably, tragically, he’ll realize…

 

They just don’t care.

 

It’s not that they don’t _care_ care; it’s just that they could care more. But they don’t. They care only a little, just enough that they’ll look, but won’t say anything back. It was like screaming into the void, and hoping that the vacuum of space would somehow, incredibly,  scream back.

 

His nervous fingers tabbed to his group chat, and as he flipped through the channels, he realized...all the most recent messages were from him.

 

It’s like the whole fucking thing shuts down; the minute Lance shows up to the party, everyone’s decided to pack up and go home. If it wasn’t happening to him, he’d probably think it was funny. Not ha-ha funny, but like, “wow, what a coincidence” funny.

 

It didn’t help that every other person in the chat was online.

 

That really just made the whole thing worse. He knew that his friends didn’t care enough to engage, and maybe they thought, “Oh, Lance could talk to a brick wall—we don’t need to answer.”

 

Wow, way to boost a guy’s self-esteem.

 

Some people would say, “Hey, embrace your talkativeness! You always keep the conversation going, which makes my life easier, because I’m _so_ awkward.” _Yeah, sure, Jan. I’m sure you love seeing my stupid fucking face pop up on your twitter feed every four minutes._

 

Most days he doesn’t notice the inky black sludge that leaks into his thoughts, slowly choking out the good ones. It just percolates, quietly; almost so much so that he doesn’t realize his thoughts have darkened until he’s thinking this way. Thinking “ _maybe I should just stop trying_ ,” or “ _nobody would notice I was gone, anyway. Or at least they wouldn’t care enough to try to get me back.”_

 

Lance knew he’d indulged the demons. He’d allowed himself to wallow, to wade through that black sludge that has quenched his ordinarily vibrant aura. He let it sneak through the crack in the door and take over. So he sat. And refreshed. And sat. The light that usually flickered in his eyes has now dulled, and he thought one last thing before just deciding to shut his mind up with sleep:

 

_And I can’t even tell anyone._

**Author's Note:**

> Ily thanks for sticking around if you did brave this fic, I warned you, sorry ;0; sometimes you just need to write stuff and then what you write is really fuckin sad. 
> 
> <3 thanks for reading, screm in the comments or smash that mf kudos button or both!


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